and this is dateline. i can t believe that their baby is lying there lifeless. she was everything to me. she was so sweet everybody. state troopers said bonnie had died in a hiking accident. the said she fell off a cliff. her mother said, they were wrong. i was screaming to them, these are defensive wounds. no witnesses, no weapon. nothing left behind by a stranger s dna. we no longer have some accidental death. this was a homicide. they had no suspect. but for years, her mother kept fighting to find bonnie s killer. bonnie s mother continues her own crusade. then after more than a decade of searching, a phone call. i just got information, there was a match. can we get a conviction on just the dna? and there was something else. something about bonnie herself. it was almost like she knew something hello, and welcome to dateline. we often see headlines about dna evidence exonerating the innocent. it seems we hear less about how dna from an unknow
keith morrison: it had been five months since 22-year-old 22-year-old chelsea bruck disappeared from big mike s annual halloween party. her costume had been found. it was found ripped underneath an abandoned building. this was interesting. it happened to be a hundred yards from the trailer park where harlan byrd had lived. what did you think when you saw that? the hair on the back of your head kind of stands up. coincidence? the detectives didn t think so. the first thing we did, we called harlan byrd in for another interview. you thought we ve found our guy here. yes. because you had been kind of wonky about him before, right? yes. things looked like they had been adding up. harlan came back to the station, this time with an attorney. how do you explain the items being found so close to your grand grandma s house? i can t explain it. do you have any thoughts to why some of her clothing would be found? none. a half mile from your grandma s place? n
system. on a semen sample for bonnie craig. they got him. or the system did. codis is short for combined dna index system. it s a national database of dna profiles created by federal state and local crime labs. and codis got a hit with you. everybody was happy. the match was in new hampshire, of all places. a man who had been in prison for arm robbery back in early 2003. but nobody got around to entering his dna into codis until late 2006. they got a hit the first time with him. so, trooper hunyor flew to new hampshire to meet the man behind the match. his name was kenneth dion. hunyor had never heard of him. hi, my name is there q and a session was taped. okay, when did you get into alaska?
it does. it s amazing this is a man who got away with murder for a long-time. he would completely scot-free if someone did put the dna into codis. it s really remarkable. which became it turned out the subject of karen s new campaign at the time. she joined the alaska state troopers and other law enforcement agencies trying to persuade every state to enter dna into codis. the national databank upon arrest. after a push for a change of alaska, the state now enters a suspect s dna when he or she is arrested for a felony just as it records mugshots and fingerprints. more than 30 states have laws in place to take dna from arrestees. we need all of them to collect it. dna doesn t lie. you get to the truth so much sooner. it saves money. it saves lives. samantha channeled her grief. she became a 9-1-1 operator. 9-1-1. what s the location of the emergency? when you have someone on the other end of the line who is calling him because they just found out somebody had died and th
they retested it and it turned out it wasn t him ouch. no one could believe it. back at square one? back at square one. and dealing with karen again. karen ramped up her campaign to keep the case in the public eye. bonnie s mother, karen campbell continues her own crusade to find her daughters killer. she remains unsatisfied with the investigation. the attention brought in tips. troopers eventually tested more than 100 dna samples. and nothing came of it but frustration. the case grew cold. as cold as some of the winter nights up here. and four years became six, eight, ten. the case faded from the public spotlight. so around thanksgiving, 2006, 12 years after the murder when trooper hunyor answer the phone one day couldn t believe it. the director of the state crime lab contacted me and said that they just got information that there was a match to the codis